The New Digital Scholar: Exploring and Enriching the Research and Writing Practices of NextGen Students

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The New Digital Scholar: Exploring and Enriching the Research and Writing Practices of NextGen Students Randall McClure and James P. Purdy. Medford, NJ: American Society for Information Science and Technology by Information Today, Inc., 2013. 400 pp. ISBN: 978-1-57387-475-5. $59.50.

If you're looking for a comprehensive and thorough book about the complicated world of library research instruction and undergraduate research papers, this is the book for you. The editors of The New Digital Scholar have collected papers written by librarians, writing instructors, and higher education administrators to give interdisciplinary insight on what they have termed "NextGen Students."

The book is separated into four parts. The first two parts explore the problems with student research-writing and present studies on how students currently research. The third and fourth parts give pedagogical suggestions and programmatic implications of those findings. The editors have done a wonderful job selecting the articles and creating a logical flow of information from chapter to chapter. The resulting collection keeps the reader's interest as the conclusions from each chapter complement and build upon one another.

Perhaps the most innovative section of the book is Part Two, which includes in-depth research studies of actual student research-writing. As author Ruth Mirth says at the beginning of her article's literature review, "Surprisingly little research has been done that observes the actual searching behavior of students in the process of composing academic research papers" (p. …